This last week I started to write my first serious post dedicated to corruption in Moldova. While I've touched on the subject a bit in my short post about The DMV or the epic saga that was our visa approval process but nothing dedicated to corruption. As you might have noticed from the title of this post this is not such a post. I realized that even starting that conversation was so daunting without certain background elements explained that it was totally unmanageable in scope. I'll try again soon but in the meantime I decided it was time to share a glimpse into accounting in Moldova - by far the most batshit insane and corrupt part of doing business here bar none.

Let me preface this article by saying that it is just a first effort to scratch the surface of this madness. By no means do I have even a rudimentary grasp on the workings of the accounting and fiscal systems in Moldova and attempts I've made to understand them have come up very short. As a team we've decided that someone needs to start taking night classes on accounting here just to get some idea of what's going on (and we have a full time accountant hired now). So with that said here's a bit about what I do know right now. Pardon me if I made bad assumptions as to intentions or root causes behind these things. After dealing with this for a day it is easy to assume that the system was entirely crafted by unhinged lunatics on a bender and to forget that there are real people trying to address real problems in the government here. That said, as you will see, they are failing spectacularly.

Ok team, this post shall be short and sweet. The title pretty much lets you know what it's about and the lead in pic gives away the end. So, Mobias Bank eh? why?

The answer turns out to be more that there wasn't anything significant to chase us away from it. In order to get there let me list off the main banking options in Moldova as well as their affiliations.

Bank

International Affiliation

Notes

Moldova Agroindbank

N/A

This is the bank used by Peace Corps which speaks rather highly to it.

BCR Bank

Erste Group (Germany)

Mobias Bank

Groupe Societe Generale (France)

Victoria Bank

N/A

Owned by and closely affiliated with Vladimir Plahotniuc, sometimes called "Moldova's one and only oligarch." Multiple people have referred to Victoria Bank as the safest bank in the country because of its association with Mr. Plahotniuc.

I'd like to say that we did exhaustive research here but we pretty much just gathered the above information and decided that we wanted our money in an internationally backed bank which leaving Mobias and BCR. Choosing between them pretty much came down to convenience of location.